© Copyright – 2009 – Christopher Kelsall
Keith Livingstone from New Zealand recently published a new book about an old training method, written in today’s language. He has taken the famous training method of the late and incomparable Arthur Lydiard and modernized it so everyone can understand the theory and application fully in a book he calls, Healthy Intelligent Training or H.I.T for short.
The Lydiard method may have produced dozens of international medals for New Zealand, Finland and several other countries, the method also is the training practise of many times that number of runners who wish to experience personal bests or want to run faster in their age-group or race well regionally, nationally, internationally or at the very top of the running echelon. People were drawn to the unique character of Arthur Lydiard, below Keith explains why.
Keith Livingstone grew up very near Lydiard in Auckland, New Zealand. He later ran for the Owairaka Running Club founded by Lydiard. Livingstone went on to run well nationally with a 10, 000m personal best 29:19 and 5000m 14:04. He has been quietly coaching international athletes for the past 20 years, including the coach of an Olympic triathlon gold medallist.
Lorraine Moller, four time Olympian and Olympic bronze marathon winner wrote: ‘Keith captures the genius of Lydiard and delivers it to athletes and coaches in a comprehensive and complete form….the Lydiard Foundation has adopted this book as it’s official text for all Lydiard coaching courses.’
The interview
CK: You have recently produced a book, which is now available for purchase called Healthy Intelligent Training. The book informs readers about the Arthur Lydiard method of training, but in the language of today.
The Lydiard method is many things, but one particular aspect I like is the simplicity of it. Did you have trouble keeping today’s terminology from clouding the basic message of the Lydiard method?
KL: No and yes!
No, because I have made a point of trawling the exercise physiology literature in the last 25 years to understand what the requirements of superb performance are – and I haven’t limited myself to just running literature. It’s a big hobby, so I’m not like a PhD candidate who has to know more and more about less and less. I’m free to find out more and more about more and more. Like a kangaroo compared to a blinkered cart-horse; able to hop all over the place having a look at whatever.
I’m interested in strength training, neuromuscular training, brain training, martial arts, the training of power and balance…boxing, swimming, cycling, kayaking, the whole box and dice. And I have a clear rationale or understanding in my own mind now (I think!) of the general physiology, and it all comes down to a simple understanding of the different muscle fibre types, and their respective dominant energy systems and nerve types, and the effective limits on those systems, and how best to train these muscle fibres and systems. Easy to describe when you say it quickly, but it took a long time to distil my understanding of the “simplicity” of all of this into cartoon format.
My brother Colin is a fabulous cartoonist and he ripped the guts out of what I was trying to get across in simple diagram form, so that by the end of the physiology section, a 12 year old could tell you what all these things represent. And by the time I went through the process of clarifying my thoughts for the purpose of the book, I realized that no one has really explained the muscle fibre types in a manner that anyone from off the street can understand. No book that I’ve read, anyhow. They write about these systems in an “assumed understood” manner, or circle around them, but at the end of this whole process I am pretty certain that the key to performance in all sports events lasting over 10 seconds comes down to an understanding of a few mostly cartoon pages in my physiology section. That’s a big claim isn’t it?
(Chris nods)
The basic premise of Lydiard’s system is incredibly simple, but don’t be fooled by this so-called simplicity. I like the notion that if an idea can’t be outlined on a business card, then it’s too complicated! So if I were to design Lydiard’s business card, I’d say “aerobic base dictates anaerobic training potential.” HOWEVER – and this is a BIG HOWEVER – there is a balance and sophistication about it that can be exquisite in its delivery, particularly in the final touches in track preparation in middle distance.
In each phase of preparation, there are subtleties and personal parameters that need to be understood to get the best results. Lydiard’s system delivered an amazing run of NZ world records and Olympic medals that has yet to be matched by any nation, Kenya included. We have to remember Snell won 3 out of 3 Olympic attempts, and his 1:44.3 world record for 800m run on grass in February 1962 is just about to celebrate its 48th anniversary as the Oceania record: to this day, no athlete from either Australia or New Zealand has run faster. That’s a fact!
Unless another special talent emerges in either country in the very near future, we are looking at a national record that looks like being over 50 years old before it’s broken. How good is that? The Kenyan, Bungei won the Beijing Olympic final last year in 1:44.65, to give you an idea of how fast Snell’s time was.
Lydiard’s knowledge was earned the very hard way. He was his own lab rat – sometimes logging as much as 300 miles a week, sometimes as little as 30, while he formulated his approach. He turned himself from an overweight, unfit man approaching middle age to a New Zealand marathon champion several times over during middle age.
He read widely, and was strongly influenced by Arthur Newton’s theories on building endurance. Arthur kept detailed diaries and monitored his reactions to training like a scientist would. So with some more experience in coaching others over a number of years, he had a very good idea of the broad parameters within which most people within the “bell curve” could improve without over-doing things. Often the most elegant and sophisticated systems are based on the final assay of huge amounts of trial and error. It’s like what my chiropractic mentor Dr John Hinwood says when people ask him how he has such good judgement: he replies that he has such good judgement because he’s experienced many years of bad judgement!
CK: It is interesting that Arthur Lydiard’s method is still misinterpreted by so many, including top-end athletes. Rich Englehart, when exasperated with someone on a chatline finally said, “Lydiard is too simple for most people to appreciate”.
The beauty of the messaging today including your book and the Lydiard Foundation courses as well as McMillan Elite is in the delivery of the message, look at the results Greg McMillan is getting with his athletes, not just in the delivery, but also in the application.
In the book, do you cover much in the way of the delivery and application of the system?
KL: Oh yes! Some would say too much! Lots of examples from the way we fine-tune athletes in our squad along the broad principles, allowing for individual reactions, that sort of thing. But the devil’s in the detail, and it’s not possible to dumb down the collective experiential knowledge of all the earlier Lydiard runners into simple black and white one-liners.
I’ve done this by getting up-front and personal, citing real-life examples of success and stuff-ups, many my own! So there’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative that ties the physiology together. We even have a section of “Case Histories” about athletes – one or two quite famous: others not famous at all, but all as valid as each other in getting points across.
When we were running with the older guys on long runs, they’d pull us back if we were going a bit too fast for the desired effect, that sort of thing. Magee did it with the emerging Snell on long runs under Lydiard’s instruction. It’s all in there!
CK: Lorraine Moller wrote the forward to the book. She being a cofounder of the Lydiard Foundation and trained on the Lydiard method producing a very long and successful running career, it must have been rewarding for you to hear her say that the Foundation will use the book as its official text for their training programs.
KL: Yes!
CK: Your book has gotten spectacular reviews from the aforementioned Lorraine Moller, also an original Lydiard athlete and your coach Barry Magee, as well as Tony Wilson of Glenhuntly Athletics. The book is billed ‘for serious runners and coaches’. So is this the ultimate reward, having the people who truly are intimate with the training method fully endorse your book?
KL: Yes – I’m very fortunate in having several very good reviews from people I respect greatly in athletics. Not only those people: it seems to hit the mark with others too. I saw one from a fellow called ‘Simon M’ in Boulder on the Amazon site: he gave it a 5 star rating. He’s obviously been around distance running, and Lydiard’s books, since 1978, and it hit the mark for him. Another guy has endorsed it highly too – Brian Taylor, a Lydiard coach in New Zealand for 40 years now. I caught up with him in person just over a week ago and watched his squad train in Christchurch. Good fun!
I like Barry Magee’s description: that the book “fills in the lines between the lines”. I realized a few years ago that I’d grown up just down the road from Lydiard, trained under his system with one of his first two athletes Barry Magee (the other was Murray Halberg), and was in a position to accurately write about what I knew, having worked for 5 years earlier as a copywriter with Radio New Zealand, and having trained as a chiropractor where I really concentrated on the physiology and biomechanics of exercise.
We don’t realize sometimes that we’re enmeshed in a continual storyline, and I had this revelation that I was enmeshed in the Lydiard storyline and was duty-bound to record what I knew. Don’t know why, but I took this on as a very important project, and if it helps just one athlete and coach get better, more consistent results, then I’m happy.
There are some things I picked up on and understood at a youngish age – little things – just from training with the older Lydiard guys on Sundays. Like a folklore, where knowledge would be rationed out by older, wiser hard men like Kevin Ryan, or by listening to someone like Lorraine, who I did a heap of running with in 1979. And of course the weekly philosophical talk with Coach Barry Magee, who Arthur, when he was still with us, named as the future repository of his system when he was gone.
I wrote the book for someone who was like me when I was in my early 20’s: a ton of enthusiasm, some good wins in championships under my belt, good natural speed and endurance, and a love for training and racing, but now and again missing my potential because of lack of knowledge. I actually moved to Australia in 1982 to study as a chiropractor to further my understanding of how everything comes together, thinking that I’d fly through that course and get back to my running at a high level later. But that didn’t quite pan out the way I thought it would, which is another story!
I haven’t seen Tony Wilson’s review, but Tony is a case in point and he actually appears as a ‘case history’ in the book. Here we have a guy who had been racing since he was in Little Athletics, who in his first year as a senior athlete at 20 ran 48.6 for 400m and a 1:49 for 800m. The 400m time alone is faster than that of many world-class middle-distance runners have ever achieved, so this guy had real potential.
This was when the myths about Sebastian Coe’s training were being propagated and believed around the world. Tony did his exceptional times as a youngster on a program with a local track coach who made sure he never ran for over an hour in any single ‘long’ run, and each training week when he was racing well included a blend of hill sprints, hard track reps, and weekend racing.
But as Arthur said, “Bad training can look remarkably like good training!”. Tony never ran faster, despite continuing with this sort of program for the next 19 years. By the time he got to me, he was 39, still in good shape, but frustrated at not being able to get at his obvious potential: he’d have yo-yo seasons results-wise, varying from pretty good to pretty darned awful considering his natural ability.
We have to pan out to macro to see what’s going on – look at our programs in context. In Tony’s case, the previous winter before his stunning debut senior track season many years before, he had enjoyed a full cross-country season, where he regularly joined the Glenhuntly distance athletes on long runs (2 hours plus) in the hills. So he’d built a good winter base from which some hard fast stuff that his granny could’ve given him would’ve got a result. Inadvertently he’d stumbled upon the original Lydiard method in all its simplicity. Long running till very fit, then fast work, to be followed by ANOTHER cycle of long running, then fast work, usually twice in a year, ad nauseam, improving every year. But he only cottoned onto the fast bit done with this “track coach”, and thought that this was “the way”. Pity – a real talent – but he’s redeemed himself lately with some Victorian age records.
Anyhow, the interesting thing in this case is that Tony contacted me after reading a few of my comments on another running blog site, and asked me to coach him. So I did, and after getting him to basically ease into a regime where he ran nearly twice his previous weekly volume, much slower, for winter, he came out in his 40th year and ran 1:54.1 for 800 and 3:57 for 1500 – times he hadn’t even approached in 8 years. He could’ve run faster over 800m but never got into a race in ideal conditions – but he regularly trounced another guy who ran 1:52.0 that season. And he was consistent for the first time.
CK: Knowing that those who know and follow the Lydiard method, know it well. It’s like either you are in or you are out, once in there is no going back. You are an accomplished runner yourself growing up very near Arthur’s home. Did you really need to do much research?
KL: I knew the overview, obviously, but inadvertently. I did heaps of research because I am a naturally very curious individual who needs to understand things at the tin tacks level. I don’t necessarily accept other people’s beliefs or dogmas as “fact” until I’ve tested it – Lydiard included.
I was the kid who blew out every fuse in the house establishing the fact that a steak knife placed across the top two bars of a 240V household plug, while in the socket, would involve the conduction of large amounts of electricity, and that, yes, what my parents said about electricity was true. So anyhow (how did I go there?), this involved lots of phone calls to some of the original “Arthur’s Boys” to verify facts – this was part of my early journalistic training and it proved very handy. If I couldn’t substantiate a story or a line between a line, it wouldn’t get into print.
Then I got very, very curious about the muscle physiology, and what each type of work would be doing inside them ‘thar cells… and that involved a lot of reading. Google and the various physiology research websites got hit more than Sonny Liston received from Cassius Clay!
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